Double Fine's Spacebase DF-9 recoups $400K investment in two weeks

Double Fine's upcoming sci-fi building sim, Spacebase DF-9, has recouped its $400K investment in a fortnight.

Where's George Clooney when you need him?

This milestone was reported by the Indie Fund, the collective of indie developers responsible for backing such projects as The Swapper and Monaco. The Indie Fund noted that it usually only invests $50 - $150K in a project - and indeed it only invested $75K in this case - but the Humble Bundle, Hemisphere Games, make all, AppAbove Games, Adam Saltsman, The Behemoth, Morgan Webb, and Rob Reid put in a the remaining $325K.

The collective noted in its announcement that 85 per cent of Spacebase's revenue came from Steam Early Access sales, while the remaining 15 per cent came from direct sales on the game's official site. Either way, it's been priced at £18.99 / $25 (or £22.99 / $30 with the soundtrack).

"This is an important milestone for us because the success of this experiment opens the door for us to support more projects of this magnitude in the future," said the Indie Fund. "To be clear, this won't affect the number of smaller projects we fund. Our bottleneck has always been finding promising projects to invest in, not lack of funds."

"It also provides an encouraging data point about bringing together larger groups of people to support larger projects, and we are mulling over what this might mean for the future of Indie Fund," the collective added.